First off - we are on snow day number three here at InsureMe, meaning the office is officially closed. A few of us are in the office this morning though…cabin fever was killing me and I won’t be in next week, so I wanted to get something accomplished before 2007.
Here is a picture looking out of the west side of the InsureMe building…pretty snowy, eh? Alright, enough about the darn snow, let’s talk about AdWords.
One of the biggest complaints that advertisers have about Google AdWords is the lack of clarity Google gives when it comes to their Quality Score calculation. Since Quality Score is one of the key elements to Google’s ad serving algorithm, not “getting” quality score can be a little more than frustrating for an advertiser.
It seems that Google may have finally realized that they were being a bit vague when explaining Quality Score, and in a rare act of “black box” clarification, Google has added a fair amount of information about quality score to the AdWords help center.
While I doubt there is any super-secret AdWords info in any of the pages, but getting a high level understanding of Google’s intentions certainly won’t hurt. So if Quality Score has been hurting your head as bad as it has hurt ours in the past, print out everything you can from these help sections, grab a cup of hot chocolate, and read away. Who knows…you could figure something out that could make you a gillion dollars.
[Bonus: I enjoyed this post on Quality Score over at the Out of My Gord blog.]
Well, the snow continues (for now), and the InsureMe office is closed for the second day in a row. Actually, pretty much everything is closed today, including most of the shopping malls.
Our apologies to anyone trying to get a hold of us on the phone. It looks like the road crews are making some headway on the highways, so I am hoping that I will be able to brave the roads in the morning to get into the office.
We have about two feet of snow on the ground in downtown Denver and it sounds like they might have three feet at the office. On the plus side, it is guaranteed to be a white Christmas here in Denver.
There’s a blizzard here in Denver today, so the InsureMe office is closed. Thankfully, our office was closed early on this morning so most of us got the word before we left our houses (thanks Tim!).
Sounds like the snow will keep coming until tomorrow afternoon - but I am hoping to be back in the office in the morning.
Here is a photo I took from my balcony at home. It doesn’t do much justice to the storm…but it sure is pretty. This is one of the reasons why we live in Colorado…snow rules.
I have never been a big fan of Ask.com. I always felt that the company did a good job at marketing itself (who can forget Jeeves), but never really delivered when it came to search experience.
I remember back in the day, Ask’s search results were basically 50 PPC ads with 10 natural search results. Going to Ask at that point usually led to more frustration than anything.
A couple years back, Ask dumped Jeeves and decided to clean up their search results. Suddenly the piles of paid results were gone, and what was left looked like your average search engine. The only noteworthy feature was the little binoculars that gave screenshot previews of web pages. The problem was that even though you could use the cool binoculars, the results themselves were bound to be bad, since the search algorithm that Ask used was fairly ineffective.
Today though, I am happy to report that I am proud of the Ask team. Why? Their self titled “double-secret sandbox for testing Ask experiences of the future” or for short Ask X.
As you know (hopefully!), keeping your Web site copy fresh, timely and relevant is really important. Since this is where your customers get information about your business, as well as the place where you connect with them, begin relationships and hopefully draw them in so they keep coming back, your copy is one of the best ways to communicate—as well as put money in your pocket.
Great copy is also important for your PPC campaigns. When your copy doesn’t measure up where consumers are concerned—or doesn’t deliver what you promised in your ads—consumers looking for information are likely to abandon your site, causing conversion rates to plummet. The result? A lot of time spent revising copy and trying to resuscitate dying ad groups. And no one enjoys that!
I received a comment on the Are the Natural Search Results Bugging Out? Post from The Ninja Affiliate (which I’ll abbreviate TNA from now on) regarding some ideas that Mar and I were exchanging in the comments section of the post.
TNA made some interesting points about how all SEO is a form of spam, which I agree with, and some points about how Google hand manipulates the search results to favor large insurance companies, which I don’t. Here is TNA’s comment:
Every link that is purchased, asked for as a reciprocal and so on is spam. If you have to give something more than what your site can offer to get a link, that is spam. The search engine results that you don’t pay for are called natural search for a reason. Natural means it was earned with out you even asking or knowing about it. I hate to say it, but to some degree we are all spamers. White hat, as well. Any one in a competitive field that is successful is buying links; Google, Yahoo and MSN all know it. But what are they to do. There hands are tied. If they penalized on this 100% it would make all the big insurance companies disappear from the natural search result. I’m sure this is driving the engineers crazy. With that said it is true the big dogs get special treatment. This is where the comments by google saying they do not hand manipulate the result bug me. They don’t for all but for individuals they do. Lets say you got 300 links to a new domain and a well know insurance company did the same to a new domain they bought for them self’s trying to branch out. I guarantee your new domain will get healed out of the natural search a lot longer than the big insurance company. Computers/algorithm are just not smart enough to know the difference between the big company and little guy when they are new domains. There is no doubt that someone has their hands in it. If you check any competitive keywords in the natural search in the first page you will find bought or sponsored links (which is the same) on all the domains. Nothing will build a strong site better than name recognition.
The Ninja Affiliate
As I was writing my reply I realized that it would be best to turn the response into a post, since the subject of SEO as spam and SE hand manipulation are both important topics. So here is what I had to say back to TNA:
This is our final video blog entry for our Insurance Blog - I thought I would share it over on the Affiliate Blog as well. Dont worry, we will start posting videos on our Agent Blog after the new year starts.
We decided to do a fairly ridiculous Holiday Special. Enjoy…
On Monday I ran across a website called Hit Tail while reading BusinessWeek’s Best of 2006 article. BusinessWeek gave Hit Tail a brief mention that said:
There is even a Web analytics site called HitTail.com that analyzes blog traffic and search patterns to spit out future post suggestions for bloggers eager to stay ahead of emerging trends and spike their rankings.
Intrigued, I went to Hit Tail and watched their demo video to better understand what they were all about. Hit Tail works by collecting information on the keywords that drive traffic to your blog or website. Hit Tail then aggregates those keywords, and uses their proprietary algorithm to look for patterns in your “long tail” keywords. Then, Hit Tail uses it’s algorithm to suggest potential keyword titles for future blog posts or articles for your site. The idea is that using the suggested keywords will help you focus your writing on long tail terms that should get you some traffic.
One of our top SEO Ninja Affiliates called me today to see if I had noticed that the natural rankings in both Yahoo! and Google were looking a little nutty. I admitted that I hadn’t (refreshing search results to see if they have changed reminds me of watching my stocks after the internet bubble burst…not something I like to relive).
For the next 30 minutes or so the Ninja Affiliate took me to different insurance related keywords and pointed out some of the things he was noticing. Some of the more interesting anomalies/changes were:
I know that a few of our affiliates are actively running blogs to try to generate leads from natural search traffic, and from what I hear it has been a little tough going. Let me assure you that you are not alone. InsureMe was the first lead generation company to start up an insurance focused consumer blog (www.insuremeblog.com/insurance), and at the end of this week, we will be shutting the insurance blog down.
There are a few reasons why we made this decision. We found that, even with very skilled copywriters, it is difficult to create a blog that is both interesting and able to draw in traffic that will convert to leads (you can count the number of leads our insurance blog generated on one hand…actually, on a woodshop teacher’s hand). Also, it turns out that no matter how hard we tried, it was very difficult to keep an audience…mainly because people don’t care to read about insurance on a regular basis (gasp!), unless they are insurance agents (and we already have a blog for insurance agents).
With all of that said, I still think that affiliates can use blogs as a tool to generate leads, but chances are you will be doing so by using your blog more as a content management system for publishing content rather than for “blogging” per say. I see blogging software as a great tool for creating websites without having to know a whole lot about HTML (although there are free CMS systems that work well too). With that said, if you do use a blogging platform as a CMS you will have to modify your blog templates a bit, but most people can pick that up after a bit of tinkering.
If youd like to try your hand at affiliate marketing but you dont have your own Web site—and you dont know how to create one—never fear; Google is now offering a way to advertise without one.
Using Hosted Business Pages, a new feature with AdWords Starter Edition, you can now create an informational Web page that tells people more about your business when they click on your ads.
Consisting of a single landing page that pops up and tells consumers more about your company and what you have to offer, these pages make having a site of your own an unnecesary prequisite for affiliatedom (I always wanted to say that!).
Yesterday we had the chance to preview what our Yahoo! Search Marketing account looks like on the new “Panama” ad platform…and it was bad. In truth, the switch from the old Direct Traffic Center (DTC - the old Yahoo! ad platform) to the new Panama platform will basically render our account unusable.
Why? It all comes down to AdGroups.
But first a little background. The Yahoo! DTC had two levels of organization for their accounts - the campaign level and the keyword level. This was imperfect at best, since most advertisers ended up with a few thousand keywords in a single campaign. Yahoo! recognized that this was a problem and designed the new Panama interface with three levels of organization - campaign, keyword and AdGroup. If this sounds like Google AdWords, it should, since Yahoo! basically copied AdWords when designing much of Panama.
I think most advertisers would tell you that having another layer of organization in their Yahoo! account is a good thing…but going from the old DTC setup to the new Panama setup brought up a huge issue - who do you assign advertiser’s keywords into AdGroups when they move over to the Panama platform?
It happens to the best of us … those of us with high paying, high profile, CEO type jobs. For the record, I am CEO and management extraordinare of my bathroom breaks.
When something doesnt go right, namely money, somebody gets fired. It appears it may be happening at Yahoo.
Yes, I am still alive … much to the chagrin of certain unnamed individuals. For my dedicated fan club members, I offer my sincerest apologies for the absence. Please send your letters of protest to Omdahl.
So, do you think Google is any different from other huge, mammoth conglomerates? Yes? No? I think no.
(Please excuse the obnoxious title - gotta have the right keywords, etc.)
For the last couple of months, I have spent a lot of time looking for a few good people to fill open positions here at InsureMe. While we have had a lot of interest in the positions, we have not yet found the right person for three of them. The thing is, we are a bit picky, but it’s like we are picking family members, so you gotta do what you gotta do.
The three positions we currently have open are:
Paid Search Manager - lead out amazing PPC team, strategize, analyze and kick some PPC tail
Paid Search Copywriter - create compelling ads and web copy that will entertain, educate and convert
Affiliate Coordinator - the backbone of our Affiliate Department. Help our affiliates by providing them the support they need to succeed
Why am I telling you all of this? Well, I am hoping you know someone who would totally rock at one of these positions. Or maybe you would rock? Eh?
If you do know someone who might fit well into one of these positions, let me know at jomdahl (at) insureme.com. Like I said, we are pretty picky when it comes to hiring people…but for the right person it could be a fantastic opportunity.
Did I mention that we were voted one of the best places to work in America? Did I also mention that our CEO drives a Mercedes covered in diamonds?
Ok, so I made up the Mercedes thing (thank you Photoshop!). But the best places to work thing it totally true!!!
Are you tired of low-performing keywords that pull down your click-through rates (CTRs) in entire ad groups? Well, youre not alone. Anyone whos tried PPC knows how frustrating it can be trying to get keywords to perform like they should.
But hold on—before you go deleting mass quantities of terms that just arent working, Id like to share with you a strategy that might help you deal with those offenders and force them to perform as they should.
When particular terms dont seem to be working—or their cost per acquisition is too high—it sometimes helps to do whats called a “Peel and Stick.” This means “peeling” them from their present ad group, “sticking” them in an ad group all their own, and writing ads designed just for those terms (rather than performing mass deletions).
I was digging through the messenger bag I use for work this weekend and found a blog post I printed out back in October but forgot to read. The post, vaguely titled Ross Dunn Answers SEO Question #4, got me thinking - are inbound links as important as I make them out to be?
The thing is, I have been doing SEO for about three years now and I InsureMe’s site has seen some decent results. One thing that I really started to notice about a year ago, at least in the insurance vertical, was that your inbound links seem to matter a heck of a lot more than your content. This was perplexing, since at every SEO conference someone is always preaching about how “content is king” - but to me it seems like content is, at best, the court jester.
In answering Question #4, Ross Dunn really helped me understand why perceive links to be the real King in SEO, and others still feel content and on-page optimization are King. I highly recommend reading the entire blog post, but to give you a taste, here are some of Ross’ main points:
Links are extremely important, but your content and on-page optimizations have to be good to harness the full power of your inbound links
Some sites might rank very well with little or no content and a ton of good links, on the other had, some sites will rank well with great content and only a few good links.
Every site ranks based on links and on-page factors…the importance of those two factors can and will vary from site to site.
Interesting stuff, huh?
Many thank yous to Ross for writing such a clear and informative post. It really helped me get some more perspective on link building versus on-page optimization.
It’s my last post for tracking week (whew), I want to talk about what can be one of the trickier things to track, your SEO results. While I think there are a number of tracking software programs out there, there are ways of tracking SEO without using any expensive software.
The first thing you need to track your SEO results is some SEO traffic. Since I am limited on space and time here, I’ll assume you have that part down already.
Next, I would look at how you have set up the tracking on your site. If at all possible, you are going to want to split out your PPC traffic from your SEO traffic. One way to do this would be to set up different webpages for your SEO and PPC efforts. If you want to use the same content for your SEO and PPC pages, I would suggest leaving the original page up as an SEO page and then make a clone of that page under a different URL for your PPC traffic. (To avoid any duplicate content issues, make sure you use the “noindex,nofollow” meta tag on your PPC pages.)
Now that you have two pages, make sure you use different links on both of the pages so you can see which traffic came from which link.
First off - we are on snow day number three here at InsureMe, meaning the office is officially closed. A few of us are in the office this morning though…cabin fever was killing me and I won’t be in next week, so I wanted to get something accomplished before 2007.
I received a comment on the Are the Natural Search Results Bugging Out? Post from The Ninja Affiliate (which I’ll abbreviate TNA from now on) regarding some ideas that Mar and I were exchanging in the comments section of the post.
Intrigued, I went to Hit Tail and watched their 
Yesterday we had the chance to preview what our Yahoo! Search Marketing account looks like on the new “Panama” ad platform…and it was bad. In truth, the switch from the old Direct Traffic Center (DTC - the old Yahoo! ad platform) to the new Panama platform will basically render our account unusable.
Happy Monday!
It’s my last post for tracking week (whew), I want to talk about what can be one of the trickier things to track, your SEO results. While I think there are a number of tracking software programs out there, there are ways of tracking SEO without using any expensive software.